Tag Archives: research projects

Current Crisis

Description

Current Crisis is a vertically integrated project developed at Georgia Tech Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) group. The project focuses on creating a simulation-style video game designed and developed by undergraduate students, which puts the player in the role of a power system operator tasked with managing the grid during extreme events like wildfires and hurricanes. The project aims to use gamified learning to teach about the critical power grid infrastructure and sustainability. Previously, the VIP partnered with Dr. Jessica Roberts and the Tiles lab to display a game demo at the Dataseum in the Crosland exhibition space. Currently, Tiles Lab is collaborating again to measure the learning outcomes and the overall game efficiency towards learning.

Access the VIP group website and the game for more information.

Sponsor(s): The video games will complement work for the NSF-funded AI Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4Opt, www.ai4opt.org) and research efforts at Sandia National Laboratories.

Research Team

VIP Group and Tiles Lab (Jessica Roberts and Stella Quinto Lima)

ContAQT

Description

Contextualized Air Quality Timelines (ContAQT) is an air pollution data platform to visualize local AQI values over time and teach users about the multiple pollutants measured in air quality ratings. The ContAQT platform is part of our AQI Data Literacy project.

For more detailed account of this project and up-to-date posts, please visit our AQI Data Litreracy project page.

Research Team

  • Dr. Jessica Roberts, Georgia Tech [co-PI]
  • Dr. Alex Endert, Georgia Tech [co-PI]
  • Sabrina R Grossman, Program Director of CEISMC
  • Jayma Koval, Research Associate II of CEISMC
  • Yixuan Li, HCC PhD student
  • Jaeri Suh, MS HCI student
  • Zeyu Hua, CS PhD student
  • Seik Oh, CS PhD student
  • Yuhan Wang, HCC PhD student

AI Literacy through Embodiment and Co-Creativity

Description

Although artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly large role in mediating human activities, most education about what AI is and how it works is restricted to computer science courses. This research is a collaboration between the TILES lab, the Expressive Machinery Lab (Dr. Brian Magerko, Georgia Tech), and the Creative Interfaces Research + Design Studio (Dr. Duri Long, Northwestern University) to create a set of museum exhibits aimed at teaching fundamental AI concepts to the public. In particular we aim to reach middle school girls and students from groups who are underrepresented in computer science.

Data Bites asks visitors to build their own training datasets to teach an AI to classify pizzas and sandwiches. After collaboratively building various labeled examples of pizzas and sandwiches using tangible pieces, learners can see how well their classification algorithm is able to distinguish between the two food items.

This 4-year project is funded by the NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program (NSF DRL #2214463). We are collaborating with the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago to conduct focus groups, needs assessments, and pilot testing of exhibit designs based off our prior work.

Knowledge Net asks learners to create semantic networks to collaboratively build up to 4 different characters in a virtual world. Characters’ appearances, likes, dislikes, and abilities can be customized which results in different interactions with the world and other characters.

This research explores how embodiment and co-creativity can help learners make sense of and engage with AI concepts.

Publications

The linked map interface shows secondary educational attainment for the world by country and US by county.

One Map, Two Map: Visualizing Social Disparities through Linked-Scale Interactive Maps

Description

People’s quality of life or socioeconomic status can greatly differ based on where they live, whether they live in different cities, different counties, or in different countries. These inequalities and disparities can be and have been measured using indicators related to the different facets of life: wealth, education, health, and even happiness. Communicating where and how those inequalities affect different people and geographical areas to the public in an effective and engaging way is imperative to progress towards a more equitable society. Information visualization, and specifically maps, are a successful mechanism for conveying these differences in quality of life and engaging people in caring about larger issues and other people.

This project investigates how people perceive socioeconomic disparities using an interactive choropleth map visualization where users can change the map to display different socio-demographic indicators, including income inequality, life expectancy, educational attainment, rate of incarceration, and prevalence of HIV/AIDS and obesity. We implemented two versions of the interface: one displaying the United States only by county, and another arranging the United States map and a country-level choropleth map of the world by country, side-by-side. We conducted between-subjects A/B user testing where we surveyed and interviewed users before and after interacting with one version of the map.

Figure 1: Choropleth map of the Secondary Educational Attainment indicator in the United States only, by county
Figure 2: Choropleth map of the Secondary Educational Attainment indicator in the United States, by county (on the right) and in the world, by country (on the left)

We hypothesize that interacting with either map will lead to stronger feelings about the intensity of inequality in the U.S., and more confidence in their opinions on disparities. Additionally, we hypothesize that interacting with a contextualized map of the U.S. within the world will influence the user’s perceptions of the U.S. differently than when interacting with the U.S. map only.

Project Team

  • Dr. Clio Andris, Georgia Tech
  • Grant Jones, Georgia Tech
  • Yasmine Belghith, Georgia Tech
  • Kurt Heischmidt, Georgia Tech
  • Dr. Joshua S. Weitz, Georgia Tech
  • Dr. Jessica Roberts, Georgia Tech

Coal Pollution Impacts Explorer

Description

When Sulfur Oxides (SOx) are emitted from power plant facilities, they do not fall directly to the ground. They are carried by air currents, sometimes great distances. Modeling of atmospheric transport and dispersion of these particles can estimate fine particulate matter (PM2.5) source impacts attributable to SOx emissions from each of the more than 1,200 coal-fired electricity generating units in operation in the United States between 1999-2018.

The Coal Pollution Impacts Explorer (C-PIE) is a web-based interface designed to visualize and scaffold atmospheric data and modeling for a public audience. Users can investigate the sources of pollution in their home county’s air, examine where pollution from a nearby facility disperses, and explore trends over time as facilities install pollution-mitigating scrubbers in response to legislative actions.

Research on the C-PIE platform investigates how data interactions can be scaffolded to support inquiry and engagement for public audiences.

The interactive C-PIE platform can be found at: https://cpieatgt.github.io/cpie/

Below you will find representations of some of our iterative development work on the platform. To read more about the impacts of coal pollution, read our recent article in the Journal Science:

Henneman, L., Choirat, C., Dedoussi, I., Dominici, F., Roberts, J., & Zigler, C. (2023). Mortality risk from United States coal electricity generation. Science, 382(6673), 941-946. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adf4915

Images & Videos

Research Team

  • Jessica Roberts
  • Lucas Henneman (George Mason University)
  • Sue Reon Kim, MS-HCI 2021
  • Srijan Jhanwar, MS-HCI 2022